The Artful Jurist

With the buzz over the censorship of a new edition of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn still going on (see previous post), now there's a new flap over what to do about the language in another literary creation.  This time the issue centers not around a white man's 19th century novel but, rather, around a 20th-21st century African American man's play.

I'm talking about August Wilson's drama, Joe Turner's Come and Gone.  The much lauded play was scheduled to be performed at an arts magnet school in Waterbury, Connecticut.  But the school superintendant pulled the plug because, like the text of Huck Finn, the script of Joe Turner's Come and Gone calls for characters in the play to use the racially charged term often referred to as the "N-word."  According to a Republican-American newspaper article, the superintendant opposed allowing teenagers in his school system to speak the word in the performance of the play.

If you're asking yourself why the school doesn't just change the offensive word to something more acceptable, it probably won't surprise you to hear that has already been suggested.  However, unlike the works of Mr. Twain (which passed into the public domain long ago), Mr. Wilson's works are fully protected by copyright, which forbids making changes to the script without the copyright owner's permission.  And the copyright owner refused to allow a sanitized revision.

Whether or not "the show must go on" in that school just as Mr. Wilson wrote it is something that has been referred to the Waterbury Board of Education.  But kudos to the school for at least knowing that it couldn't just revise the script without seeking official authorization from the copyright owner.